Following the cries of teachers at the C. H. Reeves Junior High School to take a strike poll over mold issues at that school’s campus, Education Director, Marcellus Taylor, said he is concerned about teachers taking that bold step to strike.
“Well, I do have concerns about it simply because of what we have seen happen so far.
“A lot of it has been illegal activity, there’s a process involved in expressing your grievances and unfortunately teachers haven’t utilized the agreed protocols around that, so we do have concerns about it.
“Do we think it should be something that should happen based on all the efforts we are making? No, we don’t think it should happen, but we will have to see,” he said.
So far, students have lost some 50,000 learning hours and according Mr. Taylor, if teachers do move forward with a strike, the effect would be devastating for the students.
“The department would not only be saddened by it, but we would be making all efforts to try to see what we can do.
“The truth is that we are limited, we don’t have a pool of teachers just sitting around waiting for us to call them in if some teachers decide to withdraw their labour.
“Of course whatever actions they take, then we will have to do whatever we have to do to first and foremost to ensure that students coming to school are safe; secondly, that they are provided with some form of education in the interim and thirdly, deal with the Human Resource matters as we can,” he said.
The Education Director added that the ministry met with the union just yesterday and anticipates that this situation will come to a smooth end.
“On the 9th of this month we had a meeting with the union, and at that time we made the point clear that we expected the teachers to return to work.
“We also made some commitments that we would address certain matters and so what we did in that meeting yesterday was to provide an update on where we are with all the developments,” he said.
Meantime, Mr. Taylor said the department is doing everything they can to make that school safe and comfortable.
This after The Bahamas Union of Teachers (BUT) announced that a letter requesting a strike vote has been sent to the Minister of Labor, marking the first step towards industrial action.
The union is now awaiting a response from the Ministry in terms of when and if it can take a strike poll.
